Codependent No More

Codependent No More was the debut book of self-help author Melody Beattie. It was originally published in 1987 by the publishing division of the Hazelden Foundation, and became a phenomenon of the self-help movement, going on to sell over eight million copies, six million copies of them in the United States.

Melody Beattie popularized the phenomenon of codependency with her bestseller Codependent No More. The subtitle of the book offers a hint at the apparent contradiction that accompanies codependency: How to Stop Controlling Others and Start Caring for Yourself.^[1]

History of term

The term codependent originated as a way to describe people who use relationships with others as their sole source of value and identity. It 'comes directly out of Alcoholics Anonymous, part of a dawning realization that the problem was not solely the addict, but also the family and friends who constitute a network for the alcoholic'.^[2] Codependents often end up in relationships with drug (including alcohol) addicted spouses or lovers. In the book, Beattie explains that a codependent is a person who believes their happiness is derived from other people or one person in particular, and eventually the codependent becomes obsessed with controlling the behavior of the people/person that they believe is making them happy.

Similar to Bill Wilson's Alcoholics Anonymous five decades earlier, Beattie's early work took the previously complex object relations theory and interpersonal theories of psychoanalysts like Heinz Kohut, Wilfred Bion and Otto Kernberg and put them in language the average reader could easily grasp. The book also re-phrased many of the notions expressed in the Al-Anon Twelve-step program movement into more modern language, and made the notion of addiction to a person (who was addicted to a substance or a behavioral process) part of the western cultural lexicon.

Influence of Melody Beattie's work

Codependent No More was preceded by professional literature like Timmen Cermak's Diagnosing and Treating Co-Dependence, but Beattie's book was the first "big book", on the subject, and paved the way for a new Twelve-step take-off program, called Co-Dependents Anonymous. "CoDA" has a conference-approved, AA-like, "big book" of its own. Beattie's works continue to be staples in the CoDA meeting rooms.

Co-Dependents Anonymous has influenced over a million people, and is increasingly "prescribed" by members of the professional mental health community as a self-help adjunct treatment for marital, family of origin and other relationship difficulties well beyond involvement with practicing substance or process abusers.^{[citation needed]}

Some key elements: rescuing, detachment, boundaries

A key element in Beattie's explication of codependency is that the process of "Rescuing" someone, i.e. 'solving people's problems for them...looks a much friendlier act than it is'.^[3] She was concerned to distinguish a genuine process of helping from what she termed 'Enabling...a destructive form of helping'.^[4] Building on Transactional Analysis, and on the Karpman drama triangle in particular, she highlighted how 'Co-dependents are care-takers - rescuers. They rescue, then they persecute, then they end up victimized'.^[5]

The answer, for Beattie, is ' Detachment...We mentally, emotionally, and sometimes physically disengage ourselves from unhealthy (and frequently painful) entanglements with another person's life and responsibilities'.^[6] Promoting the motto - 'Practice non-rescuing behaviours' - she urged that 'detachment...is not detaching from the person we care about, but from the agony of involvement'.^[7]

To disentangle successfully from toxic enmeshments meant a concern for personal boundaries. 'Codependents need boundaries. We need to set limits on what we shall do to and for people', and to recognise in addition that 'we will probably be tested more than once on every boundary we set. People do that to see if we're serious, especially if we haven't meant what we said in the past'.^[8]

Criticism

Like most or all Self-help publications, Codependent No More is open to the charge of being 'a kind of contemporary version of nineteenth-century amateurism or enthusiasm in which self-examination and very general social observations are enough to draw rather large conclusions', and in which, 'although a veneer of scientism permeates the work, there is also an underlying armature of moralizing'.^[9]

Critics claim indeed that what is in fact at stake 'is a way of constituting a moral self' that is less responsive to the claims of others: 'The path to normality in co-dependency...is paved with the self's progressive emancipation from social control...autonomy from external demands'.^[10] In what can been seen as part of a wider 'cultural shift from the ethic of self-denial to the ethic of self-actualization...as Beattie says, detachment from others implies a concomitant "focus on" self'^[11]

Conversely, however, others claim that, as women are 'still generally perceived as being responsible for maintaining healthy relationships', Beattie's concept of 'Codependency blames women for adhering to society's definition of the appropriate feminine role'.^[12]

References

1. ^ David Hawkins, Breaking Everday Addictions (2008) p. 180
2. ^ Lennard J. Davis, Obsession: A History (London 2008) p. 178
3. ^ Melody Beattie, Codependent No More (Minnesota 1992) p. 85
4. ^ Beattie, p. 84
5. ^ Scott Egleston, quoted in Beattie, p. 83
6. ^ Beattie, p. 62
7. ^ Beattie, p. 95 and p. 57
8. ^ Beattie, p. 217-8
9. ^ Davis, p. 171 and p. 173
10. ^ John Steadman Rice, A Disease of One's Own (1998) p. 164-5
11. ^ Rice, p. 162
12. ^ Jennifer Drew, "Codependency", in Sex and Society, Vol I (2009) p. 136